The CU2.0 Podcast

Send us Fan Mail  Before logging into this call, I studied up on who John Herrera is.  He was born in Costa Rica, then came to the US to go to college at the University of Delaware and one thing led to another and instead of going back to Costa Rica to build a better society he stayed in the US and has worked on building a better society for all of us but with a special focus on Hispanic immigrant...

Send us Fan Mail  CUNA is still at its " Open Your Eyes " to a credit union campaign and Teresa Freeborn is still heading the effort.  Regular listeners will remember Freeborn from her podcast two years ago, episode 29 , and when she asked for a return we gladly said yes. You probably heard that CUNA paused the campaign last year for what was called a re-set. Freeborn tells what happened...

Send us Fan Mail This is not an infomercial for Scienaptic , an AI vendor with a particular focus on lending.   There are two guests on the podcast -  Eric Steinhoff, a Scienaptic executive vice president, and Kevin Willborn, vice president of consumer lending at $3.3 billion Gesa Credit Union. Essentially you will hear that Scienaptic's tools are a way to speed up loan decisioning and also t...

Send us Fan Mail On July 1, Sundie Seefried, longtime CEO of Partner Colorado Credit Union, makes a huge career change. On that day she resigns the credit union job to become the CEO of Safe Harbor Financial , LLC, a Partner Colorado subsidiary formed for the purpose of handling cannabis related banking. When Safe Harbor was created in 2015, it was a groundbreaking institution for conducting compl...

Send us Fan Mail  Start today, really embrace AI - artificial intelligence, where machines think and they are good at it when fed enough of the right data - and, guess what, you are already four or five years behind the leaders and that group includes most of the money center banks and maybe even a few credit unions. Sounds gloomy? Well, it is, kind of, but CU2.0 founder Kirk Drake is here with a...

Send us Fan Mail  You may think you have it tough managing a credit union in the pandemic.  You need to talk with David Tuyo, CEO of University Credit Union, with assets edging up towards $1 billion and a growth rate in loans that's running around 30% per year. 2020 too saw sustained growth - in assets, loans, and even members.  That's despite the reality that University serves a members...

Send us Fan Mail Know this about Pete Crear: He was the first to win the lifetime achievement award from the African American Credit Union Coalition - and when they gave him the award in 2003 they decided to name it after him.   The roster of Pete Crear Lifetime Achivement Award winners is now a dazzling hall of fame of credit union heroes and heroines, including several who have been in the CU 2....

Send us Fan Mail Overdraft fees are big business for most financial institutions and it's estimated that 20% of credit union members, one in five, have an NSF annually. The worse news is that the credit union's NSF fee is just the start of the consumer's pain.  Joel Schwartz, founder and co-CEO of DoubleCheck , a Los Angeles company with an innovative spin on how to best handle NSFs...

Send us Fan Mail Every day there are four data breaches. And every year literally of billions of dollars are lost in various frauds that are fed by the data stolen in breaches.  Who pays the bulk of that loss? Financial institutions, says Jim Van Dyke, founder of Breach Clarity, an innovative company that wants to shed a bright light on the breaches themselves but also what any given breach means...

Send us Fan Mail  Sit back and listen. Over the next 45 minutes what you will hear is how a data geek thinks because Karan Bhalla, CEO of CU Rise, will show you. I did not ask Bhalla to do a demo.  This just is what he does. Show him a pile of data - it could be anything: from your Safeway grocery receipts for last year through a credit union's auto loan portfolio - and Bhalla will begin sift...

Send us Fan Mail Ask Ray Crouse, CEO of the roughly $250 million in assets Parsons Federal Credit Union, if he is helming an endangered institution and be ready to get an earful. Crouse well knows the NCUA data that show big credit unions growing (ones over $1 billion in assets) while little credit unions, and Parsons counts as small in many metrics, are struggling for air. But Crouse does not see...

Send us Fan Mail Lee Wetherington, director of strategic insight at Jack Henry, the big core maker (Symitar is theirs), has a picture in his head of the path to success for tomorrow's credit unions.  Picture yourself as a platform, he says, and, yes, a platform company is Amazon, for instance, and what makes Amazon a platform is that it creates an environment where many other vendors can also...

Send us Fan Mail Are credit union members healthier? The $3 billion Colorado based Canvas Credit Union knows the answer for its members - and the answer is that they are. That's because, Canvas, working with Filene, compiled data that looked at the health of its members versus average Coloradans along three fronts: financial, social, and health.  The verdict is that Canvas members score highe...

Send us Fan Mail Suddenly a lot of credit union CEO eyes are turned to small business as the financial institutions hunt for ways to bring in profitable business. And credit unions - many of which have been especially active in PPP lending - are finding that small business is receptive to their overture. The money center banks often are indifferent to small businesses and community banks often lag...

Send us Fan Mail Don't you wish you knew when a member is about to pop down a Chase credit card to buy a pricey pair of Nikes - especially when you are prepared to offer a $5 discount just for using your institution's credit card? Just that is the thought that has powered the development of Mall IQ, a San Francisco and Istanbul based company that has won backing for FIS .  But Batu Sat,...

Send us Fan Mail The pace of change at credit unions is quickening.  That's the central message from Doug Brown, senior vice president and GM of Digital Banking at NCR. In a wide ranging conversation, Brown explores five key trends: * Channels quickly collapsed in 2020 as digital and physical experiences merged; this is only expected to accelerate next year. Experiences were ‘de-channeled’ as...

Send us Fan Mail A dirty secret inside credit unions is that many frontline workers - and very possibly most senior staff - just do not use their institution's digital banking tools. Why bother when you work in a branch?  Just walk up to a teller and, whoosh, task handled. And then along comes a pandemic that closes many branches, and makes many members and employees leery of setting foot in...

Send us Fan Mail  Is now the time to bury the ATM? A few months ago the answer looked like a definite maybe but now, says Octavio Marquez, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Global Banking, Diebold Nixdorf, ATM traffic is up across much of the US and oftentimes it is higher than pre-pandemic levels had been. What's happening, says Marquez, is that financial institutions - credit uni...

Send us Fan Mail Ask Larry Nichols, CEO of Member Driven Technologies, a Michigan based CUSO, what's in the future for credit unions and he has a one word answer: Digital. Actually, that oversimplifies the answer because in this podcast Nichols and I talk for about 40 minutes about what's next and he in fact ticks off four basic themes: * Digital banking - by which he means many, many th...

Send us Fan Mail  This is a special CU 2.0 Podcast where the aim is to take listeners inside the CU2.0 Mastermind group where credit union executives and fintech executives join together to explore new ideas, to review problems, and together - by sharing wisdom and experiences - join in reaching higher levels of success. In this episode Ray Crouse , CEO of Parsons Federal Credit Union and board ch...

Send us Fan Mail Branches are not going away.  That's a firm belief of Nathan Rogers , a longtime financial services executive who has spent many years in shared branching - a feature he calls a significant credit union strategic advantage. Yet now, amid the pandemic, many credit union executives are talking. about pulling out of the shared branching networks.  Why bother with it if nobody is...

Send us Fan Mail  Go big or go home.  That's the bold message from investment banker Peter Duffy of Piper Sandler and for some years he has been in the thick of credit union mergers. And Duffy is here to say there's a new trend.  Used to be, most credit union mergers involved a shoebox credit union getting devoured by a bigger one.  You know why that played out. Usually the small credit...

Send us Fan Mail  Do it for me. That is exactly what more and more credit union members expect from their financial institution. Especially around payments. Amazon's Alexa is smart enough to remind us that, based on our order history, it's now time to re-order cat food.  Why can't my credit union remind me to pay my car lease, my mortgage, and the Discover bill that is always due on...

Send us Fan Mail Here's the fast track to making members feel they are being sold to: offer them products and services they have no interest in or use for. How often does your credit union do exactly that?  But if you want a member to feel understood, valued, offer him or her something they honestly want or need. If only it were so simple, you grumble. Maybe it is exactly that simple. Meet Fa...

Send us Fan Mail  Most credit unions continue to wrestle with too many deposits and too few places to park that money profitably.  Call this Part 3 of the CU2.0 deep dive into lending in the pandemic era and that is because Barclay Keith, CEO of Artis Technologies , has developed tools that will enable a credit union to empower business members - think home improvement retailers, contractors, jewe...